Workers at the leftist activist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) gave their CEO a vote of non-confidence after Margaret Huang started to lay off staff last June. The staff have equated this with the union busting tactics they usually associate with conservatives.

The SPLC union announced a 92 percent vote of non-confidence in Huang, The Guardian reported. With that response in hand, the union is now calling for Huang to resign or to be removed and replaced with a new CEO – and to reverse the layoffs that have cut staff levels by 25 percent. The union is also appealing directly to the public with a petition to encourage people to support its demands.

Lisa Wright, the chairwoman of the union’s bargaining committee, worked for the SPLC for 23 years before being laid-off. “Shock, horror, confusion. It’s been sloppy, dispassionate, inhumane. It has been the absolute opposite of what the organization says they stand for and absolute chaos since then,” Wright told The Guardian.

The SPLC was not unionized until 2019 despite its supposed unflagging commitment to organized labor through the years. Workers said they needed a union to protect them from perceived discrimination and sexual harassment within the woke organization that is publicly committed to opposing this phenomenon.

Huang became a CEO a year later but it took two years for her to reach her first union contract and was preparing to negotiate a second contract with the union when the current deal expires in July 2025. But then came the lay-offs. “It was just a real kick in the teeth. This whole situation could have been handled so much better,” said Esteban Gil, the SPLC employee who took over as the union chairman after Wright was sent home.

He criticized the SPLC for ignoring the union when it planned its cycle of lay-offs and particularly noted that the organization will be short-handed in providing legal services to illegal immigrants entering the US, especially given Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s pledge to deport illegals from US soil.

“This was designed with trauma as a feature, not a bug – to keep us confused, hopeless, afraid, divided,” he said. “It has been strategic, sloppily strategic, but it’s to bust our union – not to make the organization stronger, not to develop our programs, not to do any of those things. Because to me, it screams incompetence if you can’t change directions and move the pieces on the board without knocking all the pieces off the board to make a new plan.”

Former SPLC employee Thereatha Redding, who provided legal services to illegal immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said she and the entire legal team were laid without any warning.

“They talk about working with people in the communities, the deep south, and they just dismantled a program that was helping individuals in the deep south,” said Redding. “They did not even have the sense or the notion to even notify the people in our community.”

The SPLC offered no comment about whether it was engaging in union-busting or “inhumane” treatment of its staff but has rejected the union’s demand to fire the CEO.

In an email obtained by The Guardian, an SPLC spokesperson said: “The SPLC Board was unanimous in re-affirming its support of the recent reorganization and in its recognition of the leadership of CEO Margaret Huang. We respect the bargaining unit’s right to oppose the changes to the SPLC programs and activities, and we empathize with all employees who were impacted by the staff restructure."